Drug War Chronicle reviewed Cop in the Hood a while back and somehow I missed it.
Here it is:
I would imagine that most Drug War Chronicle readers… have little knowledge of or empathy for the men in blue.
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Moskos really shines at getting his comrades to speak openly and honestly about their attitudes, and in that sense, “Cop in the Hood” is as revelatory as it is sometimes disturbing. Such attitudes may be deplorable, but they are also understandable. When all you see is the worst of humanity, it’s easy to get alienated. As one officer put it, “You don’t get 911 calls to tell you how well things are going.”
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While Moskos by no means sugarcoats the behavior or attitudes of his coworkers, his reporting will undoubtedly help readers attain some understanding of how they got that way. Cop in the Hood is also useful for understanding the bureaucratic grinder facing police officers in large urban departments, where they are caught between pressures from above for more arrests, from Internal Affairs to do it by the book, from the neighborhoods to clean out the riff-raff and from the same neighborhoods to respect the civil rights of residents.Moskos brings the added advantage of not writing like an academic. Cop in the Hood is engaging, even riveting, and makes its points straightforwardly. Yes, Moskos references policing theory, but he does so in ways that make it provocative instead of off-putting.
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People interested in the nitty-gritty of street-level drug law enforcement need to read this book. Criminal justice students and anyone thinking about becoming a police officer need to read this book, too. And the politicians who pass the laws police have to enforce (or not), need to read this book as well, although they probably won’t.